Paul Zak, the director of The Center for Neuroeconomic Studies at the Claremont Graduate University, for years has been searching for what makes us moral, and he thinks he has the answer. In this short talk Zak explains why massage, dance and prayer may increase donation to charity up to 50%, and how morals from a Californian high schooler to a primative Papua New Guinea subsistence farmer may have an identical physiological basis. The answer he claims, is Oxytocin. Here is the talk (via Youtube):

For those of you who’ve forgotten or perhaps even repressed your memories of high school English class, the line in the title is the cry of the power-hungry and all-around homicidal maniac Lady Macbeth, the female lead in Shakespeare’s great tragedy, Macbeth. After having committed regicide so that her husband may become king, she becomes convinced that she cannot wash King Duncan’s blood from her hands. Thoughts are soliloquized, guilt is manifested in madness, and archetypes are born.

Curtain.

If you are not a humanities major, you may ask yourself why you should care about Shakespeare, and even if you are, you might be asking yourself what place this topic has in a blog dedicated to mind and brain sciences…aside from the obvious madness thing.

To answer the first question exclusively, Shakespeare is awesome. So there’s that. To more appropriately answer the first question and the second question as well, I submit that you might have more in common with Lady M than you think.

Subjects in the study performed tasks such as recalling memories from their pasts in which they performed either a good or a bad deed. They were subsequently told to fill in the missing letters in a list of incomplete words including “W_ _H,” “SH_ _ER” and “S_ _P.” Those who had been primed for guilt were 60% more likely to complete the list as “WASH,” “SHOWER,” and “SOAP” rather than more neutral possibilities such as “WISH” “SHAKER” and “SLIP.”

The researchers then decided to take the experiment a step further and examine any perceived efficacy of such behaviors. The researchers again asked the participants to recall stories of past immoral or selfish behavior, and were offered various small, inexpensive items as a reward. Unsurprisingly, amongst those offered the choice between a hand wipe and a pencil, the participants who recalled an unethical deed were more likely to choose hand wipes.

After presumably using the wipes to wash the metaphorical blood from their hands, these subjects were asked to perform a selfless deed such as donating money, the type of behavior established as increasing with feelings of guilt. While the subjects who had not been offered cleanliness products volunteered 74% of the time, only 41% of those with clean hands, and thereby apparently clean consciences, donated.

These results, from an anthropological viewpoint, are not that surprising. Many cultures make some association between evil and uncleanliness, and many religions advocate some form of ritual purification for both the body and the soul. While it is somewhat counterintuitive that such complex, useful human capacities as guilt and remorse can be allayed by such trivial things, and disturbing that feelings of physical cleanliness can decrease potential charitable acts, these are by no means complete negating effects–for the mentally stable, a bar of soap isn’t going to magically erase from your mind whatever it is you have done.

Still, one wonders if Macbeth might have turned out differently if only Purell had existed in medieval Scotland.

Why is it wrong to kill babies? Why is it wrong to take advantage of mentally retarded people? To lie with the intention of cheating someone? To steal, especially from poor people? Is it possible that Medieval European society was wrong to burn women suspected of witchcraft? Or did they save mankind from impending doom by doing so? Is it wrong to kick rocks when you’re in a bad mood?

Questions of right and wrong, such as these, have for millenia been answered by religious authorities who refer to the Bible for guidance. While the vast majority of people still turn to Abrahamic religious texts for moral guidance, there are some other options for developing a moral code. Bibles aside, we can use our “natural” sense of what’s right and wrong to guide our actions; a code based on the natural sense would come from empirical studies on what most people consider to be right or wrong. Ignoring the logistics of creating such as code, we should note that the rules in this code would not have any reasoning behind them other than “we should do this because this is what comes naturally.” How does that sound? Pretty stupid.

The other option is to develop a moral code based on some subjective metaphysical ideas, with a heavy backing of empirical facts. “Subjective” means these ideas won’t have an undeniability to them; they are what they are and that’s it. Take as an example the rule such as “we should not kill babies.” There is no objective, scientific reason why we shouldn’t kill babies. Wait!, you say, killing babies is wrong because it harms the proliferation of our species and inflicts pain on the mothers and the babies themselves! But why should we care about the proliferation of our species? About hurting some mother or her baby? While no one will deny that we should care about these, there is nothing scientific that will explain why. Science may give us a neurological reason why we care about species proliferation (it will go something like, “there is a brain region that makes us care about proliferation of our species.”), but why should we be limited to what our brains tend to make us think or do?

Subjective rules like these must therefore be agreed upon with the understanding that they are subject to change. Interestingly, some argue that science can answer moral questions because it can show us what “well-being” is, how we can get it, etc. But the scientific reason why we should care about well-being is nowhere to be found. The result is that we can use science to answer moral questions, but we have to first agree (subjectively) that we want well-being. Science by itself cannot answer moral questions because it shows us what is rather than what ought to be. (Actually, Sam Harris is the only one to argue that science can be an authority on moral issues; his technical faux-pas is an embarrassment to those who advocate “reason” in conduct).

But more on the idea of metaphysically constructed moral codes. What properties should this code have, and how should we go about synthesizing it? Having one fixed/rigid source as an authority for moral guidance is dangerous. Make no mistake: there must be some authority on moral questions, but it must be flexible, and adaptable; it must be able to stand the test of time on the one hand, but to be able to adjust to novel conditions on the other. This sounds a lot like the constitution of the U.S. But even with such a document as The Constitution, which has provided unity and civil progress since the country’s founding, there are some who take its words literally and allow no further interpretation; if it’s not written in the constitution, it can’t be in the law, they argue (see Strict Constructionism versus Judicial Activism). These folks also tend to be rather religious (read: they spend a lot of time listening to stories from the Bible; not to be confused with “spiritual” or of religions other than the Abrahamic ones). So while we must have a moral code, it must be flexible (i.e. change with time) and we must seek a balance between literal and imaginative interpretations, just as we do with the US Constitution.

Why and how is a rigid moral authority dangerous? Our authority must change with time because new developments in our understanding of the world must update how we interact with others. For example, if science finds tomorrow that most animals have a brain part that allows them to feel emotional pain in the same way that humans do, we will have to treat them with more empathy; research on dolphin cognition has recently produced an effort by scientists to have dolphins be considered and treated as nonhuman persons. Furthermore, if we don’t explain why we do certain things, we won’t understand why we do them and therefore won’t know why violating them is bad. This unquestionability aspect of God as moral authority or the Strict Constructionists as law-makers is what makes them particularly dangerous and leads to prejudice and ignorance. Our moral code must therefore be based on empirical research, with every rule being subject to intense scrutiny (think of two-year-olds who keep asking, “but why?”).

But why should we have a moral code in the first place? Perhaps if everyone followed a moral code of some sort, the world would have fewer injustices and atrocities. Getting people to follow a moral code of any kind is a completely different issue.